In a variety of professional fields, low illumination is a given, while these professionals still need to identify particular locations, navigate to these locations and perform operations related to their roles. This can apply for instance to building maintenance operators and installers of systems such as lighting systems. Other fields include fire rescue, police surveillance, power-outage repairs, search and rescue, night time photography, and so on. Usually, these professionals require the use of both of their hands to complete their tasks, and therefore cannot use or hold portable light sources.
For instance, for lighting maintenance professionals, this entails locating cables, switches, sensors, connectors, power points above the ceiling tiles, followed by performing manual tasks at one or more of these locations to repair or replace a faulty device or cable. Currently these professionals are typically provided with lanterns, torches, head-mounted light sources to perform these tasks. The latter class of illumination device helps to provide directed light whilst allowing for hands-free control. However, it is not adaptive to the changing tasks of the worker within the low light conditions. For this, full control over the amount and shape of light in an area is needed to support their tasks, in particular to switch seamlessly between scanning for areas of attention and performing localized tasks in said areas of attention where directed, local lighting is needed in a hands-free manner.
Wearable smart devices such as smart glasses with see-through displays are currently entering the market. An example of such a device is provided in US 2013/0063486 A1. In the professional domain, applications are foreseen that can enhance productivity and worker safety when performing cumbersome manual tasks in the field. One challenge and opportunity in this space is the provisioning of intuitive (hands-free) control of light in low-light conditions where external light sources are not readily available, e.g. office false ceilings, fire rescue situations, low light surveillance in a vehicle such as a helicopter, and so on, and where hands are needed for other tasks, e.g. maintenance tasks.
EP 1134491 A2 discloses a gazing point illuminating device with a light source, a direction changing mechanism for changing the lighting direction of the light source, a gazing direction detector for detecting the direction of the user's gazing line and a controller for changing the lighting direction corresponding to the detected gazing direction. When, LEDs are used as the light source and the light source is attached to the goggles worn by a user, the goggles can be useful gazing point illuminating device by themselves, even if they do not include gazing point or direction detectors, because a person normally look straight ahead except for unusual occasions where he/she purposefully avert his/her gaze. In an embodiment an LED panel is provided at the left and right ends of goggles.